What if every job was like how it started?

[rawker]

AHH yes, PLD tank stance at lvl 40, in the meanwhile

*Flash*flash*flash*attack*flash*

Don't forget to Fast Blade into Riot Blade combo so you can Flash some more.

[SnowVix]

Vague title so I'll elaborate: What if every job we have in the game was suddenly the same as how it was first introduced to 14? How different would the game be? This will not include cross-class stuff being accessible.
Got curious as I am crafting something behind the scenes to post about later and got this question

if every job were how it was originally introduced but without cross-class, it'd be unplayable. Provoke was Gladiator/Paladin exclusive. Swiftcast was Thaumaturge/Black Mage exclusive. Shroud of Saints was Conjurer/White Mage exclusive.

ARR/Heavensward jobs simply do not work without the cross-class system.

[Jade_Tyrant]

Red mage would be almost exactly the same, aside from the extra finishers tacked on to its finisher.

Yeah Red Mage would be doing alright. There's more stuff than just the finishers that'd be changed (Embolden in its original state vs now, Acceleration being one guaranteed proc with nothing else, no Engagement, etc) but overall it'd still be the same job.

...and it would get Tether back, so really that'd make up for all the other potential downsides!

[ty_taurus]

To add to this, Heavy Thrust's damage up only applied if you hit the targets flank (hitting rear or front gave no damage up) and Impulse Drive only comboed into Disembowel if you hit it from the rear (which means no combo if you hit from the flank or front. Chaos Thrusts also didn't have its rear positional at the time either).

As for Fracture, with the Dragoon combo, there was no spot you could put it, as the debuffs fell off, you were reapplying them and Fracture would have just pushed everything back, not to mention it was weak and very TP hungry.

As for wearing tank gear, only from levelling, and that gear wasn't really tank gear as it wasn't as good defensively as proper tank gear, but still stronger than normal DPS gear. Of course, this is a non issue once you got to 50. Dragoon also had the privilege of higher physical defence, but lower magic defence, which caused issues in final coil as they couldn't survive hits, specifically raid wides, especially under Blood for Blood, which meant they had to either delay their burst or get extra shielding from the Scholar to survive.

Yeah, I did see that about the positionals. Positionals in general held a lot more weight back then because it really was feast or famine with them. With Dragoon, the combo starters had positionals while the follow ups didn't it seems, so you didn't need to maintain that position throughout the combo, but if you were in the wrong spot at the start of your combo, the entire thing would flub. I should've added that.

And yeah, with the tankiness stuff, I was just wondering if there was at some point this idea that maybe Dragoon could be a sub tank or something on the developer side, but they never committed to it. Or perhaps the idea was just that at lower levels, a Dragoon could be the tank for something like FATEs or whatever by having the pseudo tank gear on and using, what was it, Helm Splitter? As a cross class from Marauder to generate Enmity. Who knows.

[ty_taurus]

if every job were how it was originally introduced but without cross-class, it'd be unplayable. Provoke was Gladiator/Paladin exclusive. Swiftcast was Thaumaturge/Black Mage exclusive. Shroud of Saints was Conjurer/White Mage exclusive.

ARR/Heavensward jobs simply do not work without the cross-class system.

Shroud of Saints was always white mage exclusive. Aetherflow was more than enough for scholar and astrologian was introduced with Luminiferous Aether which was Shroud of Saints but better and could be extended by Celestial Opposition.

[rawker]

SCH during ARR is swimming in MP. Barely had any MP issues with it compared to WHM. I can only Holy so much then my MP goes bye-bye

[Local_Custard]

Yeah Red Mage would be doing alright. There's more stuff than just the finishers that'd be changed (Embolden in its original state vs now, Acceleration being one guaranteed proc with nothing else, no Engagement, etc) but overall it'd still be the same job.

...and it would get Tether back, so really that'd make up for all the other potential downsides!

what does the tether do? :0

Yeah, I did see that about the positionals. Positionals in general held a lot more weight back then because it really was feast or famine with them. With Dragoon, the combo starters had positionals while the follow ups didn't it seems, so you didn't need to maintain that position throughout the combo, but if you were in the wrong spot at the start of your combo, the entire thing would flub. I should've added that.

And yeah, with the tankiness stuff, I was just wondering if there was at some point this idea that maybe Dragoon could be a sub tank or something on the developer side, but they never committed to it. Or perhaps the idea was just that at lower levels, a Dragoon could be the tank for something like FATEs or whatever by having the pseudo tank gear on and using, what was it, Helm Splitter? As a cross class from Marauder to generate Enmity. Who knows.

I'm pretty intrigued by old dragoon-
What would the game be like if positionals were still very important?

Shroud of Saints was always white mage exclusive. Aetherflow was more than enough for scholar and astrologian was introduced with Luminiferous Aether which was Shroud of Saints but better and could be extended by Celestial Opposition.

Was it possible to use Liminiferous Aether to make your enmity go to 0 back then? Like say the tank died and you're out of swiftcast?

SCH during ARR is swimming in MP. Barely had any MP issues with it compared to WHM. I can only Holy so much then my MP goes bye-bye

Was there a particular reason why ARR SCH had an abundance of MP?

[rawker]

Was there a particular reason why ARR SCH had an abundance of MP?

1. Aetherflow restores MP when you need it.
2. Energy Drain restoring MP
3. Lustrate restored % of max HP.
4. You can macro Embrace. Paired with Rouse, it is stronger than Physick. In fact you can macro Physick/Adlo with Embrace and it is cheaper than Cure 2.

[Local_Custard]

1. Aetherflow restores MP when you need it.
2. Energy Drain restoring MP
3. Lustrate restored % of max HP.
4. You can macro Embrace. Paired with Rouse, it is stronger than Physick. In fact you can macro Physick/Adlo with Embrace and it is cheaper than Cure 2.

wow yeah- so much MP. Did ARR scholar ever run out of MP?

[ty_taurus]

I'm pretty intrigued by old dragoon-
What would the game be like if positionals were still very important?

The positonals would be a big deal, but the general speed of jump animations might be what affects your experience the most since that's what originally got Dragoon its "floor tank" notoriety. Here's a video of the old jump animations for reference. The quality's rough, but you'll get the idea.

Was it possible to use Liminiferous Aether to make your enmity go to 0 back then? Like say the tank died and you're out of swiftcast?

Yes, Luminiferous Aether also had an enmity reduction effect like Shroud of Saints did. I believe both reduced your enmity by 50%, not reduced it to 0, but regardless they served their purposes.

Was there a particular reason why ARR SCH had an abundance of MP?

During ARR, there was no Lucid Dreaming. White Mage had Shroud of Saints. Like Lucid Dreaming, SoS gave you an MP regen, only on a 3 minute cooldown instead of being available every 1 minute. It had a potency of 80 and lasted 15 seconds, whereas LD has a potency of 55 and lasts 21 seconds. MP wasn't always a flat 10000 back then, so I'm not sure how different MP regen was, but LD now restores 38.5% of your max MP every minute. If we translate SoS's values to today, it would restore roughly 46.6% of your MP every 3 minutes. White Mage also didn't have Assize back then, so no extra 5% MP every 40 seconds either.

Scholar, on the other hand, had Aetherflow which restored 20% of your MP every minute. Now, I never really paid attention to exactly how much MP Energy Drain used to restore, and no quick google searches say anything about how much it restores your MP by, but looking at an old video, it looks like each use of Energy Drain restores roughly 5-6% of your MP? And you could do up to 3 of those per minute as well, meaning that's an extra 15-18% MP you could regain every minute. Even if you never Energy Drain, you're still looking at 60% MP every 3 minutes to White Mage's 46.6%. Also, White Mage had no way of healing anyone without spending MP outside of Benediction, which is single target and had a 5 minute cooldown during ARR. Scholar has Embrace healing, which was 300 potency during ARR, Whispering Dawn, and Lustrate.

Scholar was literally the only job I played at all during ARR, and MP was not often a concern for me, though I did absolutely carry Ethers anyway, because Extreme fights and Coils definitely pushed me to overspend on MP a lot.